A while back I was telling you that Linux Mint might use the same LTS base for Linux Mint 17 as well as the next 3 releases. Well, Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint Project Leader, announced today that the decision was made and indeed, the next 3 Linux Mint releases (and Linux Mint 17, obviously) will stick to the LTS base.

This means that Linux Mint 17, 17.1, 17.2 and 17.3 (so Linux Mint 18 will be based on Ubuntu 16.04) will all use Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a base instead of being based on newer Ubuntu releases, allowing the Mint team to "push innovation on Cinnamon, be more active in the development of MATE, better support Mint tools and engage in projects we’ve postponed for years".

According to the announcement, some applications will be backported so Linux Mint users won't get stuck with old releases for some important applications.

Another result of this change is that it will be trivial to upgrade from Linux Mint 17 to 17.1, then 17.2 and so on.

"This makes Linux Mint 17.x very important to us, not just yet another release, but one that will receive security updates until 2019, one that will receive backports and new features until 2016 and even more importantly, the only package base besides LMDE which we’ll be focused on until 2016".